# AI-driven digital advertising ecosystem - What exactly are DSP, DMP, and SSP?

What is DSP? What is DMP? And what is SSP? All these terms ending with "P" are so quite confusing! Do you want to know what are these platform used for? If you're new to digital advertising industry, you might be unfamilar with these terms. Let Groundhog Technologies be your tutor this time!

The annual event showcasing of Google Marketing Live in May 2023, focusing on AI and leveraging to the opportunity about conducting generative AI to their own products and advertising service. Apart from the synergy ,the digital advertising ecosystem has long history of these platforms to acclerate either advertisers or publishers the advertising the bidding transactions.

Bidding is an important term in digital advertising industry, besides the bid price also affects the campaign performance.
We can regard this bidding process as the supply and demand model of economic equilibrium. First of all, The demand side includes advertisers and demand-side platforms (DSP); secondary, serving as the exchange broker called ad exchanges; thirdary, the supply side includes supply-side platforms (SSP) and publishers. These parties are all connected, we'll introduce each roleplay in this industry thoroughly:

### Demand Side

#### 1. Advertiser
Generally speaking, buyers are the ones who are willing to purchase placements for advertisements. You can regard advertisers as the brands, media agencies, some of the APP publisher pursuing APP downloads, etc. They plan to display their ads via diverse channels to increase exposure opportunities.

#### 2. Demand-Side Platform, DSP
Also known as the self-serve advertising platforms, DSP allows advertisers to set up campaign objective, duration, budget, target audience, user devices, publishers and bidders. DSP adopts with the Open Real-Time Bidding (Open RTB) mechanism supply the protocol for RTB transactions. They include consistent, standardized ways to provide essential information about an ad impression. Many software companies worldwide have developed DSP platforms, such as MI-DSP™ launched by Groundhog Technologies and The Trade Desk.

Let's talk about how AI drives advertising transactions. Taking the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard as an example, there are millions of ad transaction requests (Bid Requests) within 200 milliseconds (ms). You can imagine that if all these transactions are processing manually, it would be exhausting.
Programmatic buying helps to achieve real-time, optimized and automatic transactions.
Programmatic buying refers to use the automatic bidding system buying and selling ad placements based on traffic.

The supply side must provide the the content-type HTTP header, besides it must comply with the IAB OpenRTB specification. The ads you see on any device are rendered by browsers and sent to ad networks.

The ML model will keep revising the bidding strategy and behavior based on the performance of ad network services, utilizing AI and machine learning technologies to enhance advertising effectiveness.

#### 3. Data Management Platform (DMP)
Earlier, we mentioned that advertisers can set target audiences on the demand-side platform. But have you ever thought about how to find the ideal target audience? Advertisers want their target audience to see their ads. To achieve precise marketing and effectively utilize programmatic buying, advertisers often use Data Management Platforms (DMPs) in conjunction with the demand-side platform. DMPs can combine first-party, second-party, and third-party data to further analyze user behavior data and create user profiles to find the most suitable target audience for ad delivery. For example, Presentech's MI-DMP™ combines data from Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the third-largest telecom company in Indonesia, to provide suitable audience segmentation for Indonesian advertisers.

#### 4. Ad Exchange
Ad Exchange is an intermediary auction platform that facilitates transactions between demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs). Ad Exchange typically utilizes the OpenRTB (Real-Time Bidding) mechanism by comparing bids and quality scores with different DSPs to determine the outbid demand-side platform. Ad exchanges is more transparent compared with Ad networks because of the visibility of winprice.
If you're still unclear about the whole picture, let's dive into the following scenario!

First of all, when a user visits the website, the SSP, acting as the media supply side will send a signal to the ad exchange, providing the floor price for each ad placement. In the meanwhile, the ad exchange, acting as the intermediary informs various DSPs about this ad placement demand. Once the DSPs receive the bid floor, they'll participate in the bidding process on the ad exchange. The transaction will be processed within 200 milliseconds. The renowned ad exchanges include Authorized Buyer, Smaato, OpenX, and etc.

#### 5. Supply-Side Platform，SSP
As a supply-side technology platform in the online media industry, SSP coordinate publishers and media owners to manage their ad inventory. The SSP platform play as the host role for ad placements from various publishers and media outlets. It enables them to monetize these traffic and efficiently maximize profits. For online media publishers, the benefits of using SSPs lie in their ability to manage ad placements and transactions. Besides, the system ensures advertisers can enjoy the cost-effective display ads without empty Ad placements loads.

#### 6. Ad Network
Ad Network refers to the intermediary role between publishers and advertisers in the online media industry. It acts as an agent for publishers, which actively acquires ad inventory and enables the advertisers to make one-stop purchase. When Ad network faces to publishers, the ad network procures ad placements and inventory while providing service such as ad management and data analysis to advertisers. The ad network connects numerous publishers as so called advertising alliance. The renowned ad networks include Google Adsense, Google Ad Manager.

#### 7. Publisher
The ones who own advertising placements can be referred as publishers. It includes media websites, YouTube, Google, and high-quality blog. Publishers are aiming to have placements on their websites or APPs to earn benefits from it. The brands or advertisers also can expose their brands at the best.

:::info
After introducing the major roles in the digital advertising ecosystem, do you have a better concept of its uniqueness and work flow? The programmatic buying technology benefits advertisers and online media by providing an automated transaction method which saves operation and time costs. It automatically matches suitable ad content with ad placements which also enables the entire advertising system operate in a more efficient way.
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#### 8. IAB Tech Lab
he IAB Tech Lab, an international organization has become more authoritative in the advertising industry that aims to promote the overall growth of the digital advertising industry. It is responsible for establishing international standards and providing legal support for online advertising. Its members include advertisers, advertising agencies, ad tech providers, media companies, data companies, and more. Major international companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are among its members.